If you believe in Anonymous, and call yourself Anonymous, you are Anonymous.

Anonymous has no strictly defined philosophy, and internal dissent is a regular feature of the group. It has been described it as "an internet gathering" with "a very loose and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas rather than directives".

The birth of Anonymous - 4 chan

Anonymous (used as a mass noun) originated in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan, an online community acting anonymously in a coordinated manner to commit Internet pranks and trolling, for amusement or "lulz".

A tag of Anonymous is assigned to visitors who leave comments without identifying the originator of the posted content. Users of imageboards sometimes jokingly acted as if Anonymous was a single individual. The concept of the Anonymous entity advanced in 2004 when an administrator on the 4chan imageboard activated a "Forced_Anon" protocol that signed all posts as Anonymous. As the popularity of imageboards increased, the idea of Anonymous as a collective of unnamed individuals evolved.

Trolling on 4chan often consisted of: telephone pranking, having many unpaid pizzas sent to the target's home, DDoSing, and most especially, splattering personal information, preferably humiliating, on the Internet.

In a raid on July 12, 2006, for example, large numbers of 4chan readers invaded the Finnish social networking site Habbo Hotel with identical avatars; the avatars blocked regular Habbo members from accessing the digital hotel's pool, stating it was "closed due to fail and AIDS".

Operation examples

Operation Payback

The Westboro Baptist Church, an organization based in Kansas in the US known for picketing funerals with signs reading "God Hates Fags". During a live radio current affairs program in which an Anon debated church member Shirley Phelps-Roper, Anons hacked one of the organization's websites. After the church announced its intentions in December 2012 to picket the funerals of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims, Anons published the names, phone numbers, and e-mail and home addresses of church members and brought down GodHatesFags.com with a DDoS attack. Hacktivists also circulated petitions to have the church's tax-exempt status investigated.

In August 2012, Anons hacked the site of Ugandan Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi in retaliation for the Parliament of Uganda's consideration of an anti-homosexuality law permitting capital punishment.

In April 2011, Anons launched a series of attacks against Sony in retaliation for trying to stop hacks of the PlayStation 3 game console. More than 100 million Sony accounts were compromised, and the Sony services Qriocity and PlayStation Network were taken down for a month apiece by cyberattacks.

In November 2010, the organization WikiLeaks began releasing a hundreds of thousands of leaked US diplomatic cables. In the face of legal threats against the organization by the US government, Amazon.com booted WikiLeaks from its servers, and PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa cut off service to the organization. Operation Payback then expanded to include "Operation Avenge Assange", and Anons issued a press release declaring PayPal a target.

When the Occupy Wall Street protests began in New York City in September 2011, Anons were early participants and helped spread the movement to other cities such as Boston.

In October, Anons attacked the website of the New York Stock Exchange while other Anons publicly opposed the action via Twitter.

Anons launched Operation Darknet in October 2011, targeting websites hosting child pornography. Most notably, the group hacked a child pornography site called "Lolita City", releasing 1,589 usernames from the site. Anons also stated that they had disabled forty image-swapping pedophile websites that employed the anonymity network Tor.

In 2011 the Koch Industries website was attacked by following their attack upon union members, the result being their website could not be accessed for 15 minutes.

On January 19, 2012, the US Department of Justice shut down the file-sharing site Megaupload on allegations of copyright piracy. Anons responded with a wave of DDoS attacks on US government and copyright organizations, shutting down the sites for the RIAA, MPAA, Broadcast Music, Inc., and the FBI.